HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


Robert Roe speaks with Lee Margetts, chair of PRACE’s industrial advisory committee, about its work to increase the engagement of industrial HPC users


PRACE encourages industry


With the rise in complexity of engineering products and increased competitiveness in many industries, HPC can be used to accelerate the time to market for new products, or enable new concepts to be tested and executed much faster than with traditional processes. However, setting up an HPC facility comes at a huge cost, both in terms of facility and the staff costs needed to support the system and develop HPC expertise. The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), an international non-profit association of European countries, is trying to accelerate the process of industrial uptake of HPC resources to bolster European competitiveness, skills development and technology transfer. This is being accomplished through changes to its policy around how projects are awarded time on the largest HPC systems in Europe. PRACE provides open calls with pre- defined allocations of core hours on European supercomputers provided by partners, but the way this time is allocated is now changing, to encourage better engagement with industrial users.


Not all projects are created equal Industry proposals will now be appraised against other industry projects, rather than scientific proposals. 10 per cent of the allocation of core hours will now be devoted solely to industrial users. All of these changes will help encourage the use of large-scale HPC systems by European industry.


This change was brought about by


PRACE’s development of its Industrial Track Pilot, and hopes to inspire more companies in Europe to take up the use of HPC. ‘Tier-0 is the key to this particular project,’ said Dr Lee Margetts, chair of the Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) for PRACE. ‘When we started in 2013, PRACE set up an IAC to give advice about improving engagement with industry, and the impression that I get is that this was


12 Scientific Computing World August/September 2019


 Lee Margetts is chair of PRACE’s industrial advisory committee


motivated by the European Commission wanting to see their investment have a benefit to job creation and technology transfer.


‘So in their open calls for the Tier-


0 access they had some companies apply, but not very many, and that is to be expected because there are few companies able to make use of that type of facility. However, the number of companies applying to their open calls has been dropping,’ said Margetts. This helped to initiate the process


of reviewing the way that PRACE dealt with industrial users, but this is further complicated by the complex nature of the PRACE organisation and its partners.


“Over the years applicants from industry have been compared against the same criteria as science applicants, and they always rank at the bottom because a company cannot compete”


While it is funded by the European Commission, PRACE relies on European states to provide access to some of the largest supercomputers in the EU and figuring out who gets to use these resources is no easy task. ‘Over a long period of time there have been discussions about how to improve access, and this pilot that was launched in March, has taken about a year to set up,’ said Margetts. ‘The aim is to improve the number of companies applying to PRACE open calls. The way that it works is that people who apply from industry or firms that apply, their proposals are ranked and compared with each other in their own independent bubble, rather than, which has previously happened, being compared to scientific proposals. I think what has happened over the years is that applicants from industry have been compared against the same criteria as science applicants, and they always rank at the bottom because a company cannot compete. ‘An example would be the recent high-


profile scientific output which was the image of the black hole [published in April]. This is a good example because if you are ranking proposals on scientific excellence, a company that wants to improve a widget, cannot compete on that criteria,’ added Margetts.


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